


vertigo

by SearchingforSerendipity



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Dark Will Graham, F/M, M/M, Past Molly Graham/Will Graham, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-07
Updated: 2017-11-07
Packaged: 2019-01-30 19:46:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12660207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SearchingforSerendipity/pseuds/SearchingforSerendipity
Summary: Will Graham felt like the weariest man on Earth.





	vertigo

 

 

_**i** _

  
He woke up surrounded by his dogs, mouth dry and tasting of saltwater. The house was dark and still, full of familiar sounds. Buster whined in his sleep and pressed a cold nose under his armpit.

Quietly, he disentangled himself from the pile of canines and walked slowly out of the living room. The bathroom lamp was old and fond of flickering in yellow flashes. Will stood there for a long time, watching the face in the cabinet mirror. Experimentally, he touched his cheek. It was soft, unblemished under the stubble. He touched his forehead, his belly, his shoulder, discarding his sleeping clothes. The reflection of his body told him he was lacking in filling meals.

He left the house dressed in his best clothes, stinking of cheap aftershave. The drive to Baltimore was cold enough to make his toes hurt, very long. He had to drive very slowly and stop twice and park in the curb, white-knuckled hands clutching the wheel, when his vision failed him and his sense of orientation lied to him, or when the possibility of swerving from that familiar road tempted him too strongly. Worse than feeling like he was plummeting from a great height was the certainty that the rest of the world around him was plummeting right alongside him. Sea and sky and sandstone cliff all.

No light braved the shuttered windows, the drawn curtains of the French doors. A dry wind rippled the treetops all down Baltimore’s most affluent street.

There was a gun in his pocket and half a hundred ideas flashing through a mind. He thought about mirrors, and shards. Reflections and games of light and shadow; the glint of the sharp edge of a kitchen knife. He considered music, the production of sound and thought necessary to form words, and the various uses of harpsichord string. He breathed in the memory of saltwater and swallowed the taste of warm copper as he drove back the same way he had come from.

Back home, he sat down in his porch with his dogs curled around him and watching dawn give shape to the world, painting the silhouette of the new day. It was late autumn of 2013 and Will Graham felt like the weariest man on Earth.

 

 

_**ii** _

The account was new. He had taken as many precautions to make it anonymous and undetectable as possible, and he had to hope that it would be enough. Walter had been fond of programming, and it turned out that what knowledge Will had learned from him could be put to use in older models and programs with surprising ease.

 _Dear Freddie_ , he started the first email. _Read closely. You are about to get the scoop of your career, conditional on you following a careful list of instructions. Don’t try to deviate. I will know, and the result will not be in your favor. Act accordingly, and you will become a legend and a hero._

_I make no promises about ease and safety, but I have faith you will pull it off with flair. You and I both know that if anyone can pull off a deal with the Devil it’s you._

 

 

_**iii** _

Hospitals made him feel like one great walking wound, that much had not changed. It was easy to feel like other people’s suffering like water from a stream, something chilling and cyclical and overwhelmingly organic pulling him under. But his pain tolerance was skewed, his fragility tempered by resilience. He steadied his stance and stayed on his feet.

The incandescence of memory: the murmur of waver against the cliffside. How old the high stone was, how eroded. How remote and deeply-rooted into the history and geography of the land.

“My name is Will Graham,” he told the nurse manning the reception. “I need a consult with a neurologist and a MRA. There’s something wrong with my brain.”

 

  
_**iv** _

  
“Do you have anyone you’d like to call?” The doctor asked after they showed him the bed he would be staying in. There were needles digging into the soft flesh of his forearms, machines beeping with the cadence of his heart. The hospital gown was uncomfortable, but the prison suit had been worse. “Any family member or friend?”

There wasn’t. But the dogs needed looking after, so he agreed. They gave him a phone, old as a relic in his eyes.The number came back to him easily.

“Hello?” She said, voice low and slow. It was early yet. These were probably her first words of the day.

For all that he tried the only thing that came was an echo. “Hello.” And then, without him being able to hold it in, “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

“Will, is it you?” Alana asked. Concerned, now. He heard the sound of a cupboard door opening and closing.

“Yeah, it’s me. Listen, I’m at the hospital. I haven’t been feeling well lately,” a lie, the first so far, but so close to the truth as to not matter at all, “and turns out I’ve got to stay at the hospital for some scans. I know it’s a lot, and short notice, but could you do me a favor? I need someone to look after the dogs.”

“Of course I will, but slow down a moment.” A softer intonation, familiar in the distant way a faded photograph was. How long had it been since he had heard her so warm? Time and Hannibal had made hard beasts of them all. “Are you alright?”

He had to close his eyes against her words, the irregular beeping of the machines. Dizziness made him nauseous and feeble. “No. I don’t think I am.”

A moment of silence. “You’re at John Hopkins, right? I’ll be there in half an hour.”

Alana brought him a bouquet of forget-me-nots. He remembered, very faintly, mentioning once that those were his favorite flowers, apropos to a conversation about funeral flowers and mourning rituals. These flowers could have part of his own wake.

It would have been an empty casket burial, unless they had found their bodies washed down by the river. Somehow he doubted it.

“I didn’t think you’d remember,” he said, bringing a cloud of tiny blue petals to his face. They smelled crisp and clean. He smiled tiredly up at her, conscious of the image he made: slight and wan in the hospital gown, clutching a burst of color in his hands. “Thanks. You didn’t have to.”

“I wanted to.” She sat down on the visitor’s chair by his bed. There were too other patients on his ward, one busy watching the news and another with the curtain drawn. No one gave a second look to the worn-looking man fiddling with his new identification bracelet and his visitor in the pleated yellow skirt. If they look was because Alana is the brightest thing in miles. Will had forgotten about that.

They spoke about the diagnoses for most of the trip. Then it was how he was going to organize things with the Academy, with the dogs. She left with his keys and promises to call to reassure him about the dog’s well being.

She returned. Part of it was pity, otherwise they weren’t close enough for such steady companionship. The first time around, he had been too busy being vaguely besotted in a socially stunted fashion, and she had kept her distance so as not to succumb to professional curiosity.

  
But she came back often. And when she did not, he slept.

The medication gave him fairy-tale dreams: cliffside castles, great battles. Old palaces, old temples stained with red-slick prayers. Dragons, scales glinting under the stars. Princesses and knights and witches, all of them great and lovely and terrible. Firelight and fireflies. Sometimes when he woke up he could still feel the weight of a crown of antlers weighting on his  neck. It was only awake that he remembered the ascension and the fall. 

 

 

_**v** _

  
He waited and waited, but neither stag nor wendigo appeared. The time for apparitions and hallucinations was over, had been replaced by days marked by the reliable rhythms of medication. Proper medicine. He’d almost forgotten some doctors actually went by their oaths faithfully. _Do no harm,_ so it went _._

Will felt plenty harmed. He felt harmful, something cruel and ugly. The absence of scars galled him. There was no discoloration in his ring finger, no physical marking to show he had made promises and broken them by the dozens. The realization came to him in increments, that he was a widower now, twice over.

Jack Crowford didn’t show up either, which saved him the bother of having to refuse him this time around. No use for an invalid, and no time for it. He was too busy alternatively facing off against Freddy Lounds and chasing after her sudden precognitive insight on every remarkable case to fall on his lap. Will Graham was swept away from his mind, besides Alana’s mention of his illness and the disgruntled relief of the Quantico students caused by his unannounced sabbatical. 

 

 

_**vi** _

  
He was unsurprised when anything unexpected fails to show up in the scans, nothing lacking or unduly augmented. That had been half the reason for his coming to the hospital. As it was, neuroscience hasn't advanced enough to spot anomalies of his sort.

The doctors kept him for nine days. On the tenth he was discharged. Alana was lecturing, but she made him promise to take a cab home. The dogs crowded around him when he steps foot into the yard, jumping on him and sniffing at the antiseptic smell lingering on his skin. He sat on the ground with gravel digging into his knees and hugs them one by one before getting inside and taking a long bath. Dinner was a casserole Alana left behind.

On the eleventh day he didn’t do much except dispense generous pettings and kibble. They went on a walk, long but stuttering. He kept having to stop, close his eyes and firm his feet until he felt less like a reed swaying, like a pebble falling into an abyss. The time in the hospital had given him time to find some sort of gravity field to live by. The dizzy spells were likely to get better with time, so the doctors tell him, for all that their well-meaning ignorance was worth. The disorientation, temporal and spatial both, probably would not. Time would tell.

Afterwards, sitting on a blanket as the hearth flames warmed his toes back to life, he jotted down notes upon notes. They all end up feeding the flames, but putting things down on paper helps, even if it's temporary.

He did not sleep that night, spent the next day in bed, keeping to the safe territory of his living room and focusing on breathing through alternatively receding and swelling tides of nausea. The inside of his lids was engraved with art: _Primavera, The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun_ , the slant of Hannibal Lector’s last smile.

On the thirteenth day he packed his supplies and went fishing.

 

  
_**vii** _

One of the would-be victims found him, a late night jogger who spotted his bloated form on the silty waterfront of a riverside road. The corpse had been laid with care, so that the surf would only flirt with Clark Ingram's damp, socketed ankles.

There was fishing rod in his hand, its line wrapped around his purple neck. The hook was digging into the back of his neck, piercing the soft skin of his palate and holding a map in place. It was the sort sold in outdoor supplies shops, detailing the course of rivers in different colors depending on geographical importance. Other, smaller hooks breach the plastic, each one pinpointing a spot in the map. It was no great leap to connect each place with a tragedy involving someone tangentially connected to one of Ingram's cases.

For no reason the analysts can deduce, his chest cavity has been ransacked. In place of his heart was a clump of horse hair, blackened by seawater and blood.

 

  
_**viii** _

First day back to work. Will splayed his hands on the pulpit to stop them from fiddling with his glasses reflexively. This body had not been trained out of the habit yet. He didn’t bother connecting his tablet to the projector. He waited. Any time anyone spoke he looked at them until they went still, put of shock more than anything else. His students exchange bewildered blinks. This is not how the script went.

He waited until the silence settled into solidity before starting towards the blackboard. He was no artist, but enough to draw the bare bones of a hypothetical exercise. The lines of the cliff were clear enough, the churning sea a series of squiggly waves. Will had erased the rudimentary stick figures standing together close to the very edge of the precipice before the first student had come.

  
That was _his_ , and had no bearing to the goal of the exercise.

The goal being a diverse, in-depth study of the sustainability of prolonged flight after a steep fall. How two wounded criminal might have fled from justice towards the event horizon in a variety of ways, considering the lean means at their disposal and wealth of experience and skills between the. The world they might have come to, having resurfaced somewhat intact at the shore, freshly baptized and free. Chances that could never be, now, but lived in him. The point was less to placate ghosts than it was to acknowledge their existence, bestow trainees’ essays like forget-me-nots at a grave.

So far all he had was a mass of students leaning forward in their seats towards him when he took a soundless step from the pulpit. Enraptured in the absence of noise, the certainty of a rare challenge to come. Hypothetical scenarios made for the most interesting lessons.

“Today,” he told his class, “we are going cheat death.”

 

**_ix_ **

Tobias Budge came and went. Freddie Lounds’ throat suffered a sad fate, but she would live to see other days, leaning more than ever in her typed words to make her voice ring out shrill and, ocasionally, prophetic. In the absence caused by her convalescence TattleCrime was treated to her assistants’ work. The articles were more palatable than anything Freddie had written before, wittier and more quietly insidious. A. Hobbs was a promising forensic journalist.

Will held his table and laughed until it turned to weeping. The dogs licked the saltwater from his face.

 

 

_**x** _

“Good evening, Dr Lector.”

“Good evening,” Hannibal echoed. His tone was cordially bemused, his eyes shuttered behind strands of hair. It was late. There was an apron in front of his button-down, and a knife in its pocket. His forearms and wrists were bare, immaculate, with very pale small hairs.

Faust’s third act was playing, probably from the stereo in the kitchen. Will broke out a small involuntary grin and found he could not stop. It wasn’t a very civilized smile.

“I fear you have me at a disadvantage.”

“I do,” Will agreed with ease. Hannibal’s nostrils flared at the offensive smell of honesty unencumbered by any artificial odors. He had thrown out the last of his aftershave before coming over. In the end, he had driven to Baltimore as he had been, no fancy suits.

He flickered a clump of dog hair from his sleeve. “But I’m sure you’ll catch up. In time.”

“That is reassuring,” Hannibal said amiably. The straight line of his shoulders was a promise of violence. Will felt fondness well up in him like blood to a wound.

“I think so too.” The quiet trembled between them, overflowing with the change of tides only he could hear, and a baritone’s ambitious solo recorded for posteriority beckoning from inside the house. He did not offer a hand; to touch now would ruin him. “My name is Will Graham. I understand I’m being fatally rude, but you’ll forgive me.” _In time_. “I was hoping to prove interesting enough to be you to make me dinner.”

“I’m sorry to say that I don’t find you that interesting, Mr Graham,” Hannibal said. A scandalous lie to a scandalous request, but firm. His hand went towards the door.

Will held up his freezer in offering.

“I’ve brought wine. And pig’s heart.”

The winter moon was low enough and clear enough to compete with the yellow light from the doorway. The steam for their breaths dissipated endlessly. Will leaned back on his heels with a slouch that was comfortable and, at the right angle, predatory.

Hannibal tilted his head at the right angle. Interest flickered in his dark eyes as if a light from a great distance. Recognition, of a sort. Better than nothing. A great deal could be salvaged and cultivated from nothing.

“Well, if it’s heart,” Hannibal said, and stepped back to hold the door open for him.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> there is a wealth of amazing time travel fics for this fandom (go check them out!). i had to try my hand at it. i'm not entirely satisfied with this but oh well.
> 
> come say hi to me on [tumblr](http://searchingforserendipity25.tumblr.com)


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